The communications industry is rapidly changing to adjust to emerging technologies and ever increasing customer demand. This customer demand for new applications and increased performance of existing applications is driving communications network and system providers to employ networks and systems having greater speed and capacity (e.g., greater bandwidth). In trying to achieve these goals, a common approach taken by many communications providers is to use packet switching technology. Increasingly, public and private communications networks are being built and expanded using various packet technologies, such as Internet Protocol (IP). Note, nothing described or referenced in this document is admitted as prior art to this application unless explicitly so stated.
Routing protocols such as Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and Label Distribution Protocol (LDP) use Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) for reliable transport layer communication with their peers. Currently, if fail-over occurs in a router processor running one of these protocols, the TCP sessions go down and cause a re-convergence of routing protocols. This re-convergence is expensive in terms of computation needs and potential black-holing of traffic. Graceful restart extensions of the routing protocols can be deployed but they have their own problems.